What's interesting to note is the ebb and flow, the ups and downs, of the 25 Olympic sponsor brands that were tracked for 145 days across four social networks and five dimensions of social media performance.

Some brands like P&G, BMW, Cadbury and Cisco, benefitted from an early start, while others like adidas, British Airways, Coke, EDF and Visa, concentrated their efforts later on when Olympics fever was at a peak. By contrast, a significant number of brands did not appear to engage with social media at all, or only sporadically - which is, in this day and age, pretty unbelievable to me!

Interestingly, some social media activation was undertaken in isolation or seemingly as an afterthought, or merely as an amplifier for advertising campaigns. I've long been a proponent of integration so I found it surprising that some campaigns didn't have social fully integrated.

Promising smaller brands outperformed larger ones in the rankings by adopting what appeared to be a more proactive policy of engaging in real social dialogue, thus underlining the need for two-way communication. The brands that led the Sociagility PRINT™ rankings were those that used social media to focus on engagement - not just brand awareness.

A quick visualization of the change in rankings is below, but you can download the full report here.

MaryLee Sachs

Founder • CEO BrandPie Inc.

In addition to writing two books about CMOs, both of which launched at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, MaryLee writes for the Forbes CMO Network and has remained highly active in the marketing space. She launched and leads The Conference Board's Council for CMOs, and she has been an advising member of the Marketing 50 and The CMO Club in the US. In the UK, she remains a member of the Marketing Group of Great Britain and the Marketing Society. She launched BrandPie Inc in 2014 as the sister firm to successful London-based BrandPie Ltd, a brand consultancy specializing in purpose, identity and engagement - the PIE of BrandPie.